Beware The Silk-tongued Voice On The Phone

MONTREAL — The call from Canada came in January, telling Eugene Bowman of Litchfield, Maine, that he'd won a new 1999 Cadillac and $50,000.

Congratulations, the silk-tongued talker said on the other end of the line, adding that there was just one little bureaucratic hitch.

"He told me I needed to pay $2,475.61 for customs and Canadian taxes," said the retired shoe-factory worker. "That didn't strike me as so unreasonable, with the car coming from a foreign country. Anyway, all I was really thinking was, `So, finally I got lucky!' "

No such luck.

Bowman, 67, emptied his meager bank account and got a check right off to Toronto, as instructed. He's still waiting for the car, although no longer with any hope. "I got hurt bad, lost all the savings I had," he said.

When telephone scam artists reach out to put the touch on someone these days, it is likely to be from Canada.

As the United States cracks down hard on phone fraud, Canada offers a haven for shady operators who bilk hundreds of millions of dollars each year from thousands of mostly elderly victims in the United States.

The big draw of Canada is that the country's notoriously soft criminal sentencing standards mean that even repeat offenders operate almost with impunity, paying small fines or serving laughable "community service" sentences that barely qualify as wrist slaps.

"There's just an incredible lack of empathy in the court system, even though lives are devastated and savings wiped out," said Staff Sgt. Barry Elliott of the Ontario Provincial Police. "This is brutal, heartless crime that targets senior citizens. But it also seems to be the last crime where it's OK to blame the victims as stupid or greedy."

Canada's other appeal for telemarketing fraud is that the simple fact of an international boundary makes policing and prosecution much more difficult. In some cases, Canadian prosecutors have simply dropped charges against massive fraud rings because of jurisdictional complications, coupled with the cost and headache of bringing in victims and witnesses from another country.

"Cross-border fraud with Americans being targeted from Canada is absolutely the new trend in telemarketing crime," said Bridget Small, a phone crime specialist with the Washington-based American Association of Retired Persons.

"For every operation they shut down in Quebec or Ontario, four or five seem to take its place," Small said. "It's just become a huge, huge problem."

Police in Canada take the crime seriously, as do politicians stung by recent criticisms from the U.S. government and an array of American consumer groups. But Canadian courts show an extraordinary tolerance for a breed of criminals preying on the lonely, the naive and the vulnerable.

In one recent case, a Canadian judge, J.W. Bovard, actually praised a Quebec fraud artist with a lengthy criminal record for "creating jobs" by hiring con men to cheat people out of $364,000 over two years.

Bovard also found it a mitigating circumstance that Peter McMahon had "paid utility bills and things like that," so he sentenced McMahon to a few months of house arrest at his residence in Montreal's upper-crust Westmount district. The toughest part of the penalty? During that period he was supposed to inform police when he traveled out of the province or to the United States on business.

The sentence was typical for Canada, and the court, just as typically, essentially ignored the fact that McMahon had a record of fraud, assault and theft convictions stretching over three decades.

"The message is pretty clear that criminals don't have much to fear from the Canadian justice system," said Elliott, who heads the Ontario-based Phonebusters anti-fraud unit, which coordinates with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Montreal police and other Canadian forces in targeting phone crime.

In the past four years, police say, Montreal has emerged as the new capital of telemarketing fraud in North America, with Toronto and Vancouver closing in behind.

There are plenty of swindlers still plying their trade in the United States, of course, but this year, Attorney General Janet Reno, in an unusual swipe at Canada, decried the "significant increase" in Canadian-based scams that dupe American victims into thinking they've won some sort of Canadian lottery or sweepstake.

One such scam cost a Marlborough, Mass., woman $2,111.95. That was the amount she was told had to be paid to cover "Canadian fees" after a caller told her she'd won $50,000 in the nonexistent International Value Sweepstakes. "The man on the phone was just so polite, so convincing -- he even said `God bless you' twice," said the Marlborough woman, 62, who asked that her name not be published. She lives with her disabled husband and used a credit card to pay Western Union to dispatch the money order. "It was a bad mistake trusting that voice on the other end of the line. We learned an expensive lesson."